Cutty Sark

Type

Clipper

Period

19th Century

Nation

Great Britain

Overview: Cutty Sark is one of the last surviving tea clippers, built in Scotland to race cargoes of tea from China to Britain in the era before steamships and the Suez Canal made such speed less commercially vital. She is regarded as an icon of 19th-century sailing ship design and is now preserved as a museum ship at Greenwich, London. Specifications: The ship had a composite hull construction, described as a wrought iron frame with wooden planking, with rock elm below the waterline and teak above it. Key dimensions were a hull length of 212.5 ft (64.77 m), overall length of 280 ft (85.34 m), beam of 36 ft (10.97 m), and depth of hold of 21 ft (6.40 m), giving a gross tonnage of 963 and net tonnage of 921, with a displacement of about 2,100 tons at 20 ft draught. She carried roughly 32,000 sq ft of sail across three masts, originally rigged as a full ship and later, in 1916, re-rigged as a barquentine, and achieved a maximum recorded speed of 17.5 knots. Service History: Launched in 1869 at Dumbarton, Scotland, Cutty Sark set out on her maiden voyage to Shanghai via the Cape of Good Hope in February 1870 and served in the English-Chinese tea trade through the 1870s. After the Suez Canal undercut the sailing tea trade, she found a lucrative second career in the Australian wool trade, and she later served as a training ship before being sold and renamed Ferreira under the Portuguese flag, continuing as a cargo vessel into the early 20th century. Notable Facts: Retired sea captain Wilfred Dowman rescued the battered Ferreira after spotting her in Falmouth in the early 1920s and restored her to her original name and rigging. She was towed into a purpose-built dry dock at Greenwich in 1954 and opened to the public in 1957; a major 2006-2012 conservation project raised the hull three meters above the dock so visitors could walk beneath it, and a serious fire broke out during these works in May 2007, though much of the ship's fabric had already been removed for restoration and was saved. She is considered the fastest sail-powered cargo ship of her era and one of only a couple of surviving classic clipper ships in the world.